


Down Among The Dead Men

by Littlebiscuits



Category: Far Cry 5
Genre: M/M, Spoilers, Unhealthy Relationships
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-26
Updated: 2018-04-26
Packaged: 2019-04-28 04:44:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,297
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14441643
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Littlebiscuits/pseuds/Littlebiscuits
Summary: "There's not going to be a paradise beyond that door."





	Down Among The Dead Men

The moment Joseph cuts him loose, the moment he feels like he can stand without puking everywhere Rook makes his way to the stairs, to the door. Joseph lets him, swaying out of the way as he stumbles past. Rook's fairly sure he has a concussion. Or maybe part of him is still outside, smeared against metal, so much blood and brain matter. 

Outside.

Where a portion of the world is currently on fire. Where the world - he doesn't know how much of it - is burning. He wants to drag Joseph out here and ask him how he'd known, how he could _possibly_ have known. It's like going mad all at once, trying to hang on to everything he'd always believed, in the face of the unthinkable. The utter madness of humanity.

Rook breathes and presses his hands against the door until they go white at the tips, knuckles aching. So much hope, so much - so much wasted time, so much chaos for nothing.

What the fuck is he supposed to do now?

He's back down the stairs before he realises it, listening to the drone of the lights, following the dull metal walls to the only other life in the bunker.

Joseph is humming, long bare back stretched over and away from him, hands braced on the table where Dutch had carefully laid out plans, photographs, maps, pictures of every member of the Seed family. At the beginning, the very beginning before everything went to hell. The radio is still there, handset dangling from its cradle, performing a slow spin back and forth, back and forth. Just waiting to be replaced, or picked up and used. The number of times he'd heard Dutch's voice on the other end, pushing him on, pushing him forward.

Rook has a sudden, and perfectly justified, urge to cave Joseph's skull in. 

But instead he lets his body descend into a chair, metal chill against his bare arms. His knees are dirty, green and black stains, a streak of what looks like oil at the calf. The denim's ripped in places, flashes of skin showing through. He struggles to remember the last time they were washed? Suddenly remembers Kim laughing, prodding him with a basket, all demand and wrinkled nose. He remembers sitting in her kitchen in borrowed jeans, drinking orange juice - he can't remember what they talked about. He can't...the place where people used to be, there's just an ache, a spread of numbness. It's too big, there's too much. But he can just not deal with it for now, that's his choice.

Joseph's talking now, to Rook, to himself, to God? The slow drone of the righteously deluded, something about a paradise.

"There's not going to be a paradise beyond that door," Rook says. He's too tired for it to come out anything but flat. "Just radiation and starvation, disease, cancer for generations after. Food supplies shipped in from wherever can still manage to produce it. Contaminated water supplies..." he trails off. He really is too tired, and Joseph isn't listening at all.

 

~

 

Rook sleeps, too exhausted to worry about being smothered to death by the cult leader roaming the halls. The bunk-bed in the back has collapsed onto itself, one of the struts snapped clean through, metal twisted together. He doesn't know how it happened. The other bed creaks, it's scratchy, it smells like sweat and it's too low, but Rook has very quickly run out of choices. He wakes up cold and sore in a thousand places, neck so stiff that it twangs with pain every time he turns it to the left.

Joseph doesn't sleep, as far as he can tell. Though at some point he's cleaned the blood off his face, fixed his hair. Rook finds him carefully stacking tins in the back of the bunker. 

"We have been provided for," Joseph says, quiet but assured.

"They weren't meant for us," Rook points out. Part of him wants to fight about it, wants to stab right back, but he knows that would be stupid right now. He's tired, and his body is beat to hell. He wouldn't be alive now if he didn't know when to fight, and when to let the fight pass him by. He has plenty of time to hate him now.

"The point stands," Joseph continues, and when he turns his head his gaze is unwavering on Rook's face. "Directionless anger solves nothing."

Rook remembers Joseph's anger well enough, directed would have been one word for it.

"So how long does the collapse last?" Rook demands. "How long are we supposed to stay here?" How long could they stay here, how long will the supplies last? Rook had always viewed people who prepared like this with a sort of bemused puzzlement. He doesn't know how this _works_.

"It is not a simple thing to scour a world clean." Joseph settles back on his heels, turns until he can face him. 

"It's going to be a lot of things, but clean isn't one of them," Rook says after a pause.

Of all things that's the comment that gets a strange half smile from Joseph, as if Rook is the one spouting nonsense. He pulls himself to his feet and draws within touching distance, hands lifting as if he means to catch Rook's shoulders and pull him closer. Like a brother, or a child.

Rook steps back.

Joseph sighs and lets him.

"There is so much resistance in you still. I understand that you haven't fully accepted yet. But we have time."

"You're just not sure how much, or if we'll still be alive when that irradiated wasteland out there somehow, miraculously becomes a paradise."

"You don't need to fear the future. I will be with you." There's a firm reassurance there that Rook doesn't even know what to do with. That had always been the most unnerving thing about Joseph, the certainty. The fact that he'd surrounded himself with people who could _make_ you believe. That certainty had spread like a virus. A kinship of abused, broken people who found power. That was always going to end badly. 

But Rook doesn't have anyone left to protect. Joseph is effectively neutered in here. There are no followers left, no Heralds, no fucking Bliss, and no plan other than to sit and wait out the catastrophe. He did his damn job after all, Joseph Seed is imprisoned.

Unfortunately so is he.

"The last people you said that to are all dead," Rook points out.

For a second there's something, something like fury in Joseph's expression. But then it smoothes out, shunted away like it was never there. Instead there's only sympathy, and that's somehow worse.

"I understand now." Joseph says it quietly, as if sharing a secret. "You never had a choice, you never could have left. The path that you were on, your purpose, was as certain as my own."

It's a thought Rook will admit to having had himself. But hearing it from Joseph's mouth makes it feel far too real.

Joseph does touch him then, long fingers curled around his shoulders, eyes oddly intense.

"I forgive you," he says simply.

"I don't need your forgiveness." Rook's mouth feels numb.

 

~

 

Rook's still some distance away from dozing when Joseph appears in the doorway, a hovering shape, posture strangely unnatural, waiting. He'd found a shirt somewhere, too big in the shoulders, too short in the sleeves, neck looking strangely vulnerable like a bird's. Rook would know, he'd broken more than a few.

There's no violence in his posture, though part of Rook is still looking for it, still expecting it. Has wondered, fleetingly, if he'll wake up to Joseph carving words into his skin. John's jagged handiwork is still etched on his chest, and he doesn't feel like adding to it. He's bled enough for the Seeds already.

"What?"

There's no reply to his demand, just the slow settle of weight. 

The only bed. The only bed in the bunker. Rook doesn't know where Joseph has been sleeping the last few days, or even if he's been sleeping. But now he's here. Even in the dark, face half turned away Rook can feel his stare. He's just waiting, making no demands.

Rook could kick him out, could do more than that. Rook has spent the last few months trying to solve everyone's problems with violence, and he'd become good at it. He'd admit to himself maybe too good. He'd ground his way through Eden's Gate with the sort of easy momentum that had unsettled him, and he's been biting it back since he woke up here. But it's still there, under the surface. The strange wrongness of inaction, of stillness. Of Joseph. It feels like there's more to fight. The only problem is he can't see any end to that, not one that doesn't finish with dead bodies and regret. Joseph's insanity isn't a frothing madness. It's focused delusion, unnaturally steady and unsettling. 

Much as Rook doesn't want to be here with a madman, he doesn't want to be here alone either. He wants to be here with Seed's corpse even less. He settles for moving over but leaving a knee half in the space, barring Joseph from getting close enough to touch him.

Rook stares into the darkness for a long time. He doesn't know if Joseph sleeps. It's the first time he doesn't wake up cold. But that doesn't mean he has to like it.

 

~

 

Six days in Joseph finds a notebook in one of Dutch's many drawers. He takes it to the small room at the back and writes in it, handwriting slow and sharp. The new word of Joseph, or whatever his religion of one is going to be. Rook doesn't want to ask, he's too certain that Joseph would insist on reading it to him. He doesn't want to know what Joseph intends for the future. He doesn't want to see his name scrawled down in the pages.

During the day - which is whenever the lights are on full now - Joseph talks to Rook, sometimes even like a normal person, a detached, convinced-he's-god's-chosen sort of person, but a person nonetheless. As if this is how it's supposed to be now, no anger for his murdered siblings, no grief for the thousands of Peggie's strewn across Hope County. He just accepts, on faith, that this is where they're meant to be. Chosen by God, and on some path to the future. The assumption that Rook will have to follow him, whether he believes or not, whether he wants to or not. Joseph seems content to wait, locked underground. He prepares the food, he takes care of the generator, he writes in his damn book, he gives sermons when he thinks Rook might be listening. Though Rook is never listening.

Rook doesn't have the spare energy to worry about any of it.

As for his own religion...

Rook doesn't know how the water purification works. But he has faith that it does, that it will continue to do its thing, without his supervision or intervention.

That's about as much religion as he can stomach right now.

 

~

 

"God sent you to me." 

Rook's only half awake, but Joseph's whisper drags him back into his body. He blinks, the red lights give everything an unsettling glow, like everything is on emergency power. It makes them feel like they're buried so much deeper.

A murmur, and then a repetition, as if Joseph thinks he needs to hear it again. 

"You can't deny that now. I thought you came to take me, but you came _for_ me."

Rook starts at the unwelcome whisper of fingers against his face, as if Joseph wants to turn Rook, press their foreheads together. Rook catches Joseph's naked wrist, levers it away.

"Don't."

"I believed that you were sent to test my resolve. You destroyed all that I had built. Showed me how easily kingdoms can fall. But in the end - I should have trusted."

The hand is back, warm, dry fingertips touching the edge of his jaw like Rook is a fucking religious experience. Rook's eye twitches and he turns his head away.

"I understand now. You were the one. It was a mistake to try and destroy each other for we can only be indestructible together."

Joseph's voice is quiet, closer, though Rook hadn't felt him move. There's no room to shift away.

"Indestructible together. We're not meant to fight. We were made for each other. To protect the new world. To shepherd it into a new era."

"Famine, and cancer, and contaminated water," Rook murmurs again, though he's past the frustration that Joseph won't understand. He supposes they'll both see eventually. "There isn't going to be a paradise. We'll be lucky if there's a humanity."

If they don't die in this bunker first.

"You came to make me strong. To burn all doubt away." Joseph says. He's not listening, he's never listening in the dark. Rook is always only ever half talking to him.

 

~

 

The wavering, soft strains of 'Amazing Grace' drift from three doors down. A song never meant to sound vaguely threatening, but somehow Joseph manages it. Somehow Joseph manages a lot of things. 

Rook thinks about kicking the door shut, but irritating noise is better than no noise...or those fucking lights, that sound like a thousand moths should be slamming themselves against them over and over. How Dutch didn't notice that he has no idea. Twelve days in and he's about ready to smash every one of them with a wrench.

How many rooms does this bunker have again, how many paces from one side to the other? How much distance if he tried really, really hard. He could really use a drink right now, but Joseph poured them all away. Not with his usual dispassion, but with jerky upends, something old and personal growing through the calm of him. He could have protested, but Rook has always been a ridiculous drunk, a fact he hadn't particularly wanted to share.

Rook shakes a tin that's lost its label. The slosh is solid and liquid at the same time. Peaches? Carrots? Dutch would know. He obviously had some sort of system. How much food, how many days, how many times can they eat without worrying about rationing? He still doesn't know how the water purifier works. Is the air filtration good enough? Are they both dying of radiation poisoning already?

Rook is good at shooting things. He's good at moving, at reacting and dealing with whatever's trying to kill him. It had always been easy for him. The only thing that ever was. Surviving, finding the way out.

He's not good at this.

He doesn't know how to get out of this.

 

~

 

Every day it gets colder, unpleasantly so. Rook has been haring through the wilderness for months, with only the occasional stop for a jacket once the sun went down. It rankles him, mostly because Dutch's jacket sleeves are too short by a good few inches.

When Rook asks, Joseph teaches him how the water purifier works, then seems confused at Rook's quiet laughter.

Rook decides not to mention that Joseph has effectively killed his own little religion.

 

~

 

Rook would give anything for the sound of rain, a storm, hail, anything. He hates the quiet at night, he's not used to it, he doesn't trust it. All he can hear is the lights, the slow, deep shift of Joseph breathing. He can never tell if the other man is asleep or not.

The question is answered a moment later, a touch to the side of his face, the barest of pressure. As if Joseph is checking whether he's still there, still alive. Rook has to wonder if they share the same fear, if Joseph even remembers how to be afraid like everyone else. If his dead body would finally tip him over some sort of final edge. A madness even Joseph couldn't find meaning in.

A more spiteful man might kill himself, just to make him face it.

Rook reaches up and grips Joseph's hand, but that's as far as he gets, just a tight circle of fingers, and the rasp of threadbare cord at Joseph's wrist. Familiar, enough that he hates it. He hates that they have a routine, a pattern. Inch by inch he's started accepting these little slices of unwanted intimacy, mini sermons in the dark. Having another person around was supposed to be an anchor against the madness of solitary confinement. To stop the brain from going crazy. What do you do when the anchor you've been left with is Joseph Seed?

"You've been fighting it," Joseph's voice is soft. It doesn't need to be persuasive because he believes everything enough that the truth barely matters to him any more. "I have too. But we don't need to any more. There's no reason for you to hide. We have both been tested, and come bruised and bloodied and ready to this place."

Ready for what? Rook wants to ask. There's nothing left out there. But he feels like that starts a whole sermon he doesn't want to hear. He shouldn't have touched him, should have known he would talk. That's all Joseph ever does once he has your attention.

"You more than most, bruised and bloody and yet standing, when more righteous men have fallen."

"You're currently a religion of one," Rook reminds him, not for the first time. "I don't want to be your brother, and you're not my father."

Joseph looks at him, the same way he always looks at him, as if he sees something Rook doesn't. But it's too much in the dark, with him so close he can feel Joseph breathing.

"Do you need neither then?" Joseph asks, as gently as he's asked anything of him. "You who have sent so many to final judgement."

Unsettled, Rook lets him go, but Joseph doesn't try and touch him again.

"All our sins will be forgiven," he says instead.

"Go to sleep," Rook tells him, presses his hand down onto the bed. It twitches under his fingers, and Rook pins it still.

 

~

 

Joseph isn't fine all the time. Which shouldn't have come as such a surprise. Though fine is perhaps a stretch too far for what Joseph is on a daily basis. Sometimes he doesn't come to sleep. He shuts himself in the small room at the end of the last corridor. The one Rook has designated his 'church' just so he doesn't have to go in there. If Rook goes to the doorway he can hear him talking, occasionally worse than talking. Whatever demons he has, apparently being the chosen one and prophesizing the end times didn't fix them. Huge fucking surprise. So Rook leaves him alone, he lays cold and annoyed on the bed, when he should be relieved. Occasionally turning around on the stupid, noisy, cheap bed frame. It squeals protest like a hundred angry bees made of steel.

The problem is that this has become normal, familiar. Rook's started falling asleep to Joseph's voice. He knows he shouldn't. Joseph and his fucking whispering, the soft certainty, the quiet, reasonable tone. It's going to drive him insane. It's going to break him in some way he won't be able to fix. Break him in a way he can't even see, like Jacob. And that's the thought that scares him.

It's a dangerous habit he needs to break. 

 

~

 

He spends the entire thirty seventh day of - he's no longer sure whether it's captivity, imprisonment or something more complicated - but he spends it pulling apart and then fixing the trashed bunk-bed. He has a sledgehammer, he has a crowbar, he has fasteners and nails. He also has duct tape for the sharp edges. He very pointedly doesn't think about whether he's wasting them.

The new bed is made out of the original two, ugly but functional. It sags at the end and the head is made mostly of duct tape and hope. 

For a second it feels like a victory.

Joseph stares at it, and without a word he accedes to Rook's unspoken command. He seats himself, his book settled beside him.

"I will be here," Joseph says quietly. It sounds like a reassurance, a comfort.

It feels more like a threat.

 

~

 

Rook dreams of giant fleshy maggots, eating the world one mouthful at a time, a writhing carpet of them that goes on forever. He wakes up cold with a pounding headache, and can't find a single fucking aspirin in the bunker.

 

~

 

Rook tries to read a book, he tries more than once to read several of them. But he's never really enjoyed reading. The inactivity of it. The stories always unfold too slowly, he gets bored.

He's started and discarded every book in the bunker less than six weeks in, and three of those were instruction manuals.

Rook misses driving, he misses flying, he misses fresh food, he misses the freedom to plunge off into the wilderness on a whim. He misses other people's faces. 

He misses being warm.

Rook isn't an indoor sort of person. He feels like an animal in a trap, and he knows it's only going to get worse.

 

~

 

Rook doesn't know whether he chooses or not, whether he falls against all better judgement. But Joseph is waiting for him, patient and still as if he'd been waiting since he was sent away. 

Whose choice...whose need. Does it even matter any more, when there's no one else. When Joseph opens his mouth to speak Rook presses a hand down over it. He finds the hard edge of his teeth under his palm and keeps pressing. 

"No. Seed. One fucking night, just let me sleep. I'm tired and I can't - "

Joseph blinks up at him, Rook lets his hand fall away. Wordlessly Joseph makes room for him in the bed. It almost makes Rook falter. That one easy movement that's suggestive of something more intimate. Like an accusation. Is that why you're here? Is that what you want?

When he looks up Joseph is looking right at him, balanced on an elbow, all shaded skin and scars in the dim light. As if it doesn't matter why he came.

"All our sins will be forgiven. All of them." It's quiet, breathed out, like permission.

Rook's pushing his narrow body over to make room, only he keeps pushing, finds the warm length of Joseph's arm, painted and scored with violence. He slips his fingers around Joseph's wrist, eases it to the side and down. 

It doesn't feel like punishment. It feels like surrender, and Rook hates it. But he's tired, and he can hear the rough little catch in Joseph's breathing, and the sound of the blanket sliding down. It drowns out the hum of the lights and the strange, flat echo from the metal walls.

Like something necessary.

That's how he justifies it to himself then?

This is necessary. One crazy person in a bunker is already too much. Joseph is the only one left and Rook is...Rook is human.

He doesn't expect Joseph to feel so much like a person, stupid of him, when that's all Joseph has ever been, more human in his brokenness. All angular hips and legs and warmth.

Rook can't look at him, doesn't want Joseph to see whatever is on his face. What flavour of desperation he can dig his fingers in and pry open, make use of. So he leans in, searching fingers finding the half loosened gathering of Joseph's hair, and pushes his mouth open.

Joseph kisses back, halting, as if it's been a long time, then steadier, then aggressive, all in the span of less than a minute. Rook can hear his own breathing. Faster than he'd like, thumb of his other hand pressed into Joseph's narrow waist, resisting the urge to move, push, pull. He looks down, without meaning to, catches the word 'Lust' carved there, and stifles a laugh. It escapes as a groan instead because, yes, that's exactly what this is. He isn't going to lie to himself.

"You're going to let me," he murmurs, a statement, or a question. He's not sure. He doesn't mean to say it.

"Yes," Joseph says, in agreement, to anything, to _everything_. His eyes are half shut, soft. Seeing a version of Rook who doesn't exist, a version he doesn't want to be, couldn't be if he tried. Rook thinks about him gouging the eyes out of a man, thinks about him ordering people be sliced apart like so much meat with a smile. This should feel more like punishment.

Like punishment. Only hurting him is not his intention. He should do, it's what he deserves. But not like that, not like this. 

Maybe it's Rook's punishment, maybe that's what it's been all along.

Higher now, he can read the word 'Eden' in the dark. Rook flattens a hand over it, uses the other to unzip Joseph, to edge his pants down in slow shoves. Joseph doesn't protest, though half his body is scored like he should. Rook presses him down, shares the heat of him, the slow inevitable rolling shift of hips, and feels human for the first time in forever. It's easier than it has any right to be.

Joseph's fingers slide against the bottom of his shoulder, where they finally curl and dig in, try to pull him closer. Rook swallows another laugh.

_So, who's a fucking sinner now?_

God.

Fuck.

Rook kisses him again because he can, because looking at him is somehow worse.

"You were always meant to be mine," Joseph breathes against his mouth.

Rook's not sure it even matters any more.


End file.
